Language, commerce, and cultural exchange in an Atlantic world hot spot

Reviews

“This exploration of localized sociocultural mixing and extensive, illicit commerce on a Dutch Caribbean island makes for a fascinating study of colonial agency. The Antilles was the most dynamic site of creolization and contraband in the early modern world. Anyone interested in Atlantic history will want to read this excellent book.”
—Philip D. Morgan, author of Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry

“Rupert’s rich analysis of multiethnic Curaçao is an original and substantial contribution to Atlantic and Caribbean history. Her book is an excellent case study of creolization and contraband trade—phenomena that informed most, if not all, societies in the colonial Americas—and scholars of the Atlantic world will turn to it for comparative purposes.”
—Wim Klooster, author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History

When Curaçao came under Dutch control in 1634, the small island off South America’s northern coast was isolated and sleepy. The introduction of increased trade (both legal and illegal) led to a dramatic transformation, and Curaçao emerged as a major hub within Caribbean and wider Atlantic networks. It would also become the commercial and administrative seat of the Dutch West India Company in the Americas.

The island’s main city, Willemstad, had a non-Dutch majority composed largely of free blacks, urban slaves, and Sephardic Jews, who communicated across ethnic divisions in a new creole language called Papiamentu. For Linda M. Rupert, the emergence of this creole language was one of the two defining phenomena that gave shape to early modern Curaçao. The other was smuggling. Both developments, she argues, were informal adaptations to life in a place that was at once polyglot and regimented. They were the sort of improvisations that occurred wherever expanding European empires thrust different peoples together.

Creolization and Contraband uses the history of Curaçao to develop the first book-length analysis of the relationship between illicit interimperial trade and processes of social, cultural, and linguistic exchange in the early modern world. Rupert argues that by breaking through multiple barriers, smuggling opened particularly rich opportunities for cross-cultural and interethnic interaction. Far from marginal, these extra-official exchanges were the very building blocks of colonial society.